Denzel Washington's Martyr Complex

IN HIS LAST MOVIE, The Bone Collector, Denzel Washington played a brilliant, frustrated quadriplegic. In his new one, The Hurricane, he's an unjustly imprisoned boxing contender. You do wonder: Is this man's subconscious trying to tell him something?

If Washington does see himself as trapped, he's got reason. In the decade since Glory, he's gone from magnetic new presence to reliable standby without ever becoming the phenomenon he should have been in between--never provoking an intense public response, no matter how many female moviegoers think he's a perfect object of fantasy. Instead, through a combination of America's abiding racial hang-ups and his own virtuous impulses, he's gotten stuck being the new Sidney Poitier for an audience that neither remembers the old one nor flocks to see his replacement, yet has been slow to overcome its uses for the type.

The reason the job of Admirable Black Actor has suddenly started looking archaic is that for a younger generation of performers, things have finally loosened up. Will Smith is a superstar who isn't afflicted with the curse of responsibility, and Taye Diggs is having exactly the simple career as a black dreamboat that Washington both wouldn't and couldn't--for a surprisingly integrated audience, too. But this has happened too late for Washington, who might have been more electrifying if he hadn't had to be admirable. He commands respect, but maybe we should rue all the great piffle we've been deprived of.

In The Hurricane, he's playing Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a prizefighter whose 1966 frame-up on a murder rap by racist New Jersey cops was once notorious enough to inspire Bob Dylan's final foray into protest music. I don't want to slam The Hurricane; it's decent and often involving, and it probably wasn't that easy to get made. Yet it's basically a TV docudrama with elephantiasis, swollen by twenty or thirty extra minutes just to leave you in no doubt that it's an Oscar contender.

You can't help guessing that the director, Norman Jewison, was drawn to the material as a substitute for the Malcolm X biopic he was set to direct until Spike Lee complained that only an African-American filmmaker could do it right--at a time, of course, when only one sprang to mind, although you can't call that Lee's fault. In any case, Jewison is sure out to prove that honky liberals can so appreciate black grievances; The Hurricane's relatively complex structure doesn't hide its lack of a single unexpected nuance. The upbeat finale becomes so much the point that the hero's two decades in the slammer almost appear as time well spent.

Washington is extraordinarily good in it. He creates a human being with a complex and occasionally eccentric inner life out of a character the movie mainly wants to use as a poster. But we've been down this road with him before. After Steven Biko, Malcolm X, and now Rubin Carter, what black martyr will he play next? Not only in terms of movies, the problem with martyrdom as inspirational fodder is that past a certain point, heroism can't help devolving into masochism.

Part of Washington's dilemma is that winning an Oscar for an uplifting movie like Glory and, especially, playing Malcolm X for Lee do create obligations for an African-American actor. Ever since, he's had to be noble, like Greer Garson. Signing up Washington is all but obligatory for movies about racial issues that aspire to prestige and consequence, and he delivers even when the movies don't. But nobility can hobble an actor, which is why it's a job better left to lordly but uninteresting performers like Gregory Peck--or Poitier, who was compelling mostly because of a tension that had as much to do with being Hollywood's first black leading man as it did with the situation on the screen.

Washington, by contrast, is versatile and fun to watch the way Poitier never was--not that his movies gave him much occasion to relax. (Picturing a playful Sidney Poitier boggles the mind.) In a big action flick like Crimson Tide, which uses Washington's skin color to create an illusion of subtext, he can be dull, in that clenched Poitier way. But in any part that gives him half a chance, he's so alert and persuasive that his only peer is Tom Hanks--and Washington is free of Hanks's big vice, sentimentality.

Then again, half a chance is often all he gets. Hanks can shuttle easily between important-looking movies for Steven Spielberg and cuddly froth for Nora Ephron, because that's what movie stars do--but not Washington. Insofar as it's a choice, his penchant for seriousness just suggests that his taste is drearier than his talent; he won't let himself be frivolous, even though good frivolous movies can stay in people's minds for years after important-looking ones have turned into video-store clutter. Even in frankly commercial projects, he furthers Poitier's old uplift-the-race agenda by playing professionals--lawyers or military men whose personal lives are marginal to nonexistent. However, it isn't just his own priorities that are to blame; you bet there's something missing here, and that something is sex. Given the way movies work and what the two of them look like, why do you suppose Tom Hanks gets more action onscreen than Denzel Washington does?

When you consider how famous he is for making women swoon, it's telling how rarely his movies have given them any opportunity to indulge themselves. At forty-six, he could pass for a decade younger but seems positively eager to take on roles his actual age and up--like the father in Lee's flawed but underrated He Got Game. It's as if he can't wait to ditch a sexual charisma that he may think is silly but that he's also been prevented from capitalizing on fully. With his savoir faire and taffy voice, he'd be a joy to watch in a romantic comedy. But until The Best Man startled the biz by crossing over, white moviegoers wouldn't buy tickets to all-black love stories, and interracial ones aren't any studio's idea of surefire box-office magic, either.

That's why The Bone Collector was so interesting: because Washington, playing someone almost completely incapacitated, was about as openly come-hither as he's allowed himself to be since Devil in a Blue Dress flopped. On one level, Phillip Noyce's thriller about a paralyzed detective and the reluctant policewoman he's grooming to succeed him was a mighty literal-minded example of our culture's insistence on turning African-American men sexually innocuous before letting them be attractive. But the byplay between Washington and costar Angelina Jolie trumped that cliché; he was so assured that you had no trouble buying the idea that she'd wind up preferring the hero's one mobile finger to anyone else's body.

However, since The Bone Collector didn't aspire to be more than enjoyable claptrap, Washington himself probably doesn't appreciate that it's a better movie than The Hurricane. For that matter, so is The Best Man--a well-made trifle that, unlike but largely thanks to the movies by director Malcolm D. Lee's cousin Spike, enjoys the luxury of just being about some black people. Not only that, its leading man gets to make like a matinee idol without much worry about being a role model. Sure, Washington has laurels that Taye Diggs would happily sign on Satan's dotted line just to try on in the mirror. But when they look at each other's careers, which one do you think feels more wistful?

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